We're down to the final day... everyone has been doing well and they are all quite enthusiastic. We've had a couple of young teens attend and it was fun working with them. One id d a great job of demonstrating correct ukemi from iriminage... oh to have those knees back again. The other I called up in front and coached him through a static technique in which he absolutely collapsed his adult partner, a fellow twice his size.

We've been working on how to put power "inside" the partner, not outside where his strength is. This has involved trying to get the group to understand the relationship between how and where you place your "attention" and how that effects your partner's ability to feel what you are doing and resist by grounding out the energy. We got to the point at which we played just a bit with how one can start messing with the partner's structural integrity before physical contact is made.

This isn't a very senior group... the dojo just opened a couple of years ago. But the concepts weren't totally new to them which is due to their teacher starting on them from the very beginning of their training. I think that this will be a tremendous experiment to see what can happen when students are taught so-called advanced concepts right from the start of their training. Rather than let them train for years wrong and then, after decades of imprinting incorrect mental and physical responses, say "oh, and by the way, here's what's really going on..." these folks will be operating on a different basis right from the start. If they stick with it, they'll be an awesome group eventually.

Today should be great fun. We'll be working on ikkyo from the standpoint of these same principles. I've found that the best way to get at deep and complex principles is to start with exercises which are as simple as possible. When too much is going on, folks get too "ramped up" and miss the important stuff.http://www.aikiweb.com//blogger.goog...t.blogspot.com